Chad’s Morning Brief: Abbott Polling Better Than Wendy Davis Among Women, What are the Castro Brothers of Texas Running For?, and Other Top Stories

Here is your Morning Brief for the morning of April 16, 2014. Give me your feedback below and tune in to The Chad Hasty Show for these and many more topics from 8:30 to 11am. Remember, you can listen online at KFYO.com or on your iPhone/Android with the radioPup App.

Important Election Dates:

Early Voting for City and School Board Election: April 28 – May 6

Election Day for City and School Board: May 10

Early Voting for GOP and Dem. Primary Runoff: May 19 – May 23

Election Day for GOP and Dem. Primary Runoff: May 27

Facebook, Texas Tribune

Abbott Strong

Well a new poll from PPP is certainly interesting and full of bad news for Wendy Davis. According to Breitbart Texas, Abbott leads Davis overall 51-37, but that’s not all.

Attorney General Greg Abbott has not only survived—but thrived—amid Wendy Davis’ prolonged effort to sour female voters against the GOP with the “War on Women” strategy. New PPP numbers show Abbott holding a commanding lead among female voters 49 to 41 percent.

In a heads-up race, Abbott continues to uphold November 2013 findings from PPP with a strong lead at 51 to 37 percent overall. Wendy Davis’ unfavorable ratings among women continue to break conventional media narratives showing at 46 percent.

Even Governor Rick Perry is doing well for the first time in a PPP poll since his failed Presidential run.

Remember, PPP is a left-leaning poll so most likely the results are even better for Abbott. Devastating news for the Davis campaign.

The Castro Twins Are Running

The New York Times released a story on the Castro twins of Texas last night. The article by Jason Horowitz takes a look at what the two brothers might be running for in the future. The article even discusses the possibility that Mayor Julian Castro could be tapped as a VP contender in 2016, a possibility I have discussed many times since his keynote speech at the 2012 Democratic Convention.

Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio faced off in a televised debate on Tuesday against a Republican candidate for Texas lieutenant governor, even though Mr. Castro, officially anyway, is not running for anything at all.

“Sometimes I get impatient,” Mr. Castro said on a recent afternoon here. “And I figure I have nothing else going on, so I might as well.”

The mayor was joking, up to a point. Ever since he became the first Latino to give a Democratic National Convention keynote address in 2012, he and his identical twin brother, Representative Joaquin Castro, the Texas Democrat who represents San Antonio, have sought ways to stay on the national radar. Very few doubt that the mayor, the bigger political personality of the two, is angling for the vice-presidential spot on the 2016 Democratic ticket and that his brother is positioning himself for a potential run for statewide office, or against Senator Ted Cruz, the Republican Tea Party hero, in 2018.

“Democrats have to put up somebody strong in 2018 in that Senate race,” Representative Castro said, “whether it will be me or not.”

The 39-year-old brothers seem to be everywhere these days, and not just because they are hard to tell apart. Not only is the mayor debating border security with the candidate for lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, on Univision, the congressman is holding a $2,500-a-head fund-raiser next week with a “special guest”: Mayor Castro. The congressman just wrote an attention-grabbing first-person article inTexas Monthly about his freshman year in Congress. The mayor rents hotel rooms out of town to work on his memoir, due out in 2015. The lobbyist Heather Podesta held a watch party when he first appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The mayor, who is criticized at home for his abundant time out of the city — “I spend more time here than I do anywhere else,” he countered — has lampooned his own ambition by appearing in a spoof video in which he asks Siri on his iPhone, “Should I run for higher office?” Siri replies, “Of course you should,” and then calls him “Mr. Presidente.” Together, the Castro brothers have told their up-from-the-barrio story at dozens of Democratic state dinners and college campuses.

While the Castros have projected a fresh Latino face for their party, some Democrats are concerned that the brothers suffer from both an overabundance of political caution and a lack of Spanish skills. Mr. Castro, for example, passed on a potential cabinet position in the Obama administration that might have made him a more appealing running mate. Neither brother, both of whom graduated from Stanford and then Harvard Law, speaks fluent Spanish. And neither is learning it.

Those drawbacks make it all the more critical for the Republican stronghold of Texas to itself become a selling point in the brothers’ political résumé. To help turn Texas into a swing state, the brothers are supporting President Obama’s former field operatives in a project called Battleground Texas, which seeks to turn out the Hispanic voters who offer Democrats a demographic opportunity. Their hope is that the 2014 Democratic nominee for governor, Wendy Davis, wins a remarkable upset, or at least has a strong enough showing in November to force a Republican presidential candidate to compete in a state that Republicans have long taken for granted.

“That opens up a real opportunity for him,” Ms. Davis said of the mayor after he introduced her last week at a rally in a park framed by freeways. She added that when it came to putting Texas in play in a presidential election, it helped to have “a vibrant leader like Julián being on the ticket.”

The three-term mayor, wearing gleaming black shoes, talked up his signature prekindergarten program in an interview, but grew impatient when questions began to hint at his vice-presidential ambitions. Asked what Democratic Hispanic candidate could counter a Republican Hispanic candidate on the 2016 presidential ticket, he smiled and put sweetener in his iced tea.

“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s a good question.”

The answer?

“Call me in 2016,” he said.

The congressman said his brother or Representative Xavier Becerra of California would be the most obvious Democratic vice-presidential choices if Republicans put a Hispanic on the ticket, but the mayor insisted it was too early to game out scenarios. When it was suggested that one spot seemed taken, he said, “Who’s that, Clinton? Yeah, yeah.” As it happens, the mayor had lunch with former President Bill Clinton in San Antonio in February.

These and many more topics coming up on today’s edition of The Chad Hasty Show. Tune in mornings 8:30-11am on News/Talk 790 KFYO, streaming online at kfyo.com, and now on your iPhone and Android device with the radioPup App. All guest interviews can be heard online in our podcast section after the show at kfyo.com.

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